Australia holds anti-terror summit

Australia: A national meeting on counter-terrorism and violent extremism was held in capital Canberra on Thursday with the participation of Australia’s federal, state and territory chiefs of police, security, intelligence and education agencies.

The meeting was called urgently by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the wake of the shooting and killing of Curtis Cheng, a veteran police accountant, outside Sydney’s Parramatta Police Station on October 2 by 15-year-old Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, Xinhua news agency reported.

Turnbull said the shooting of Cheng by teenager Jabar has shown that “radicalisation and extremism could be seen in the very young people that we would regard as children.”

He urged police and security agencies to work together to combat the evolving threat of home-grown terror and encouraged them to try new approaches.

Also on Thursday, two men were charged in relation to the shooting of Cheng.

Talal Alameddine, 22, who was once arrested after his home was raided in the counter-terror raids on October 7 in relation to Cheng’s killing, but was later released.

He was charged with supplying the gun to Jabar, the Iraqi Kurd born in Iran.

The second to be charged was an 18-year-old whose brother went to the same high school as Jabar. He has been in custody since the raids.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said the offences the 18-year-old has been charged with carry a maximum lifetime imprisonment.